With half of Africa’s population under the age of twenty-five, it is impossible to gainsay that Africa is the world’s largest reservoir of youths. However, the huge potential of global domination that comes with this abundance of youths has not been reached. Frankly speaking, we have barely scratched the surface. To even begin with, most of these youths are unemployed: Africa has a youth unemployment rate of 77%. This is partly due to a lack of quality education; around 89 million youth are out of school in Sub-Saharan Africa. Interestingly, there are about 25 million unemployed graduates in Nigeria alone.

This means that the problem is not limited to lack of education, but extends to lack of clarity and direction, lack of information and exposure, lack of soft skills, and lack of technical skills.

The conference was designed to give African youths clarity and enlighten them about the vast opportunities available to them, the skills they need to acquire to compete favourably to secure these opportunities, where those skills can be acquired, and how these opportunities can be utilized for their development and that of Africa/Globe.  

Hence, the theme of the global conference 2021  was “Unleashing the Potential of African Youth to Become Sustainability Champions & Global Citizens”

The goal of the “By and for Youth” conference was to provide group mentoring to 50,000 African youths via the conference. Ito set a tone that centred around CLARITY, DIRECTION, MENTORSHIP, SOFT/LIFE SKILLS and NETWORKING at this conference. 

The online conference hosted speakers and panellists from 6 continents and 20+ countries. Participants that attended  were from 30+ African countries